Edmonton resonated with South American and accordion music over the weekend.

The Edmonton Accordion Society held their annual three-day Extravaganza. The University of Alberta presented a recital of contemporary Brazilian music at Convocation Hall. The Vaughan String Quartet combined the two, in a concert where they were joined by the distinguished classical accordion player Antonio Peruch.

Since their formation four years ago, the Vaughan have established themselves as the city’s most enterprising string quartet. Their last season highlighted Canadian works, which they introduced to audiences in France and Italy over the summer.

Their concert on Saturday at Holy Trinity Church was the first of a new season titled Connections, with each concert concentrating on music from a different international region. Opening with Brazil was hardly surprising: one of the two husband-and-wife pairs who form the quartet is from Brazil (the other is from Italy, the country for their next concert on Oct 29).

They started with two fine string quartets, all the more welcome because of their rarity. Carlos Gomez (1836-1896) was the father of Brazilian classical music, now best known for his operas. His Sonata in D Major, in spite of its title, is a fully fledged string quartet, and a very attractive one.

It starts in a sunny, Brahmsian fashion, there is a touch of Mendelssohn in the scherzo, and a rather doleful slow movement enlivened by a middle section that picks up the mood of that scherzo. So far, appealing but solid late 19th century music. Then the last movement breaks into something decidedly less European, inspired by one of the composer’s dreams.

The pizzicato opening turns into almost a gallop, the cries of the donkey that appeared in the dream are heard, and the short but very picturesque movement seems to herald later Brazilian music.

Gomes’s compositional mantle was taken up by Heitor Villa-Lobos, but his String Quartet No.1 should really be titled Six Pieces for String Quartet. Indeed, in its original 1915 form it was called a suite; Villa-Lobos added three more movements in 1946 and retitled it.

There is little sense of an overall quartet structure, apart from the slow-fast movement alteration. There is, though, some really attractive music, from wistful and the melodic (lovely playing from violist Fabiola Amorim in the third movement), through a movement evoking the composer’s train journeys around Brazil, to the final happy combination of jig and fugue.

Two very alluring Brazilian works, then, that must have been completely unknown to the majority of the audience. The second half of the concert switched to Argentina, and the tango. The Vaughan opened with a couple of salon pieces played with great style and passion, and four of the eight short works featured the accomplished playing of Italian-born Edmontonian accordionist Peruch. The compositions of Astor Piazzolla, the foremost composer of tangos (1921-1992), dominated, his rather Bachian Fuga y Misterio being particularly arresting.

The combination of accordion and string quartet is a happy one, clearly enjoyed by these musicians. The quartet provides the overall colour (often in an accompanying role in these pieces); the accordion presents not only wind tones but sometimes a more percussive role.

In some of the pieces the players were joined by two dancing couples, and the festivities continued in the basement of the church after the well-attended concert, with tango dancing and instruction. A most entertaining and attractive start to the Vaughan’s new season.

Meanwhile, as pianist Roger Admiral pointed out, there was little specifically Brazilian in the music of the mostly young Brazilian composers he and virtuoso saxophonist Allison Balcetis presented at Convocation Hall on Friday.

Rather, the works all represented an international post-modernism, with extended techniques, often a plethora of notes recalling the New Complexity movement of the 1980s, and clear influences from electro-acoustic music.

Particularly effective were a pair of atmospheric works by André Ribeiro (b. 1975), Linha de Sombra for saxophone and Nuvens for saxophone and piano. Torus, a wonderful, intentionally rather mechanical minimalist piece by the best-known composer in the program, Marcos Balter (b. 1974), was notable for its hoquetus effects (notes and rhythms echoed alternately between instruments) and sense of a slowly circling musical landscape.

What many of the pieces had in common (amplified in the composers’ program notes) was a desire to break down traditional structures. While this is clearly an attempt to extend musical language, it also suggested an uncertainty, maybe even a confusion as to where to go, that came across in much of the music.

A reflection of our era, perhaps, and in stark contrast to the ubiquitous A-B-A structure of the tangos of the Vaughan’s concert.

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